Page 45 of Ringer
Two hundred and forty miles away, a different girl and a boy, both dressed in stolen clothing, both with a stack ofstolen cash rubber-banded in their jeans, and their hair cropped so short it might recently have been shaved, slept together in the very last seat of a northbound Greyhound bus. Who knows what they were dreaming about? A sign announced they were coming up on Philadelphia, but they didn’t stir, and the bus didn’t stop, and they sailed on.
PART I
ONE
LYRA HAD STARTED COLLECTING THINGS. When she saw something she liked, she pocketed it, and usually by the end of the day she was weighty with the sloughed-off skin of someone else’s life: losing lottery tickets, Snapple bottle caps, ATM receipts, pens, chewed-up foil that came off the cheap bottles of wine sold down at Two Brothers Beer & Liquor.
In the privacy of her small room in the double-wide trailer gifted to them by Gemma’s father, which to Lyra, formerly known as 24, felt very luxurious, she shook out her new belongings on the comforter and tried to listen, tried to hear them speak to her of this new world and her place in it. Her old belongings had spoken: the bed at Haven had whispered, and the Invacare Snake Tubing asked questions, the snobby syringes had insulted her with their sharp little bite, and the long-nosed, greedy biopsyneedles used for marrow extraction had always wanted gossip, more and more of it.
But these new objects told her nothing, spoke of nothing. Or maybe it was just that the outside world was so noisy she couldn’t hear.
She was no longer a human model. She was a she, not anit.But it was now, here, with a room of her own and photographs from her earliest childhood Scotch-taped to the walls, that she didn’t know who or what she was.
Here she could wake when she wanted and eat what she liked, although since she’d never prepared her own food, she and Caelum, who had been 72 until she named him, mostly subsisted on cans of soda and granola bars Rick bought from the grocery store. They did not know how to fry an egg. Rick taught her to use a can opener, but the microwave bothered her; its humming energy reminded her of Mr. I.
Caelum spent hours sitting cross-legged on the couch, watching whatever channel happened to be on when he first pressed the power button: news channels, movie channels, and his favorite, the Home Shopping Network. Lyra had learned to read. Caelum learned how to watch. He learned the world through the things it bought and sold.
He did not want to learn how to read.
There were sixty-two trailers in the Winston-AbleMobile Home Park, and the whole thing could have been slotted down comfortably in two of Haven’s wings. But to Lyra it seemed infinitely bigger, because it was unknown, because of all the things she’d never seen before: wind chimes and old Halloween decorations and cars on cinder blocks and pink plastic flamingos; lawn chairs and barbecues.
Caelum stayed inside and watched the world through the pinhole of the TV screen, and Lyra walked for hours a day and put things in her pockets and sorted through them like an archeologist trying to decode hieroglyphs. They were both trying to learn in their own way, she thought, but she didn’t like it even so. Sameness was the only way she had ever understood who she was. What she was. Now, everything had changed. He was inside, and she was outside, and that made them different—at least, during the day.
Night came again and again like a tide foaming over the trailers and the cars and the scrubby trees, and turning it all to the same smudge of darkness, rubbing shapes into shadows. The night broke Lyra and Caelum’s separateness. It collapsed the space between them; they fell into its depth and landed, blind, together.
Rick worked the graveyard shift, and when he didn’t, he went to bed early, still sweating a faint chemical smell. Every night, Lyra and Caelum walked down to theunoccupied trailers on lots 57 and 58. He found a garden hose, and in the sticky air they’d let it flow, drink from it, throw water between their hands at each other just for the fun of it, because fun was new.
They kissed. They kissed for hours, until Lyra’s lips were sore and tender to touch, still heavy with the pressure of his mouth. With her tongue she found the ridges of his teeth, and the soft rhythms of his tongue in response. She touched the vault of his mouth and the strange slick texture of the inner side of his cheeks. She let him do the same, let him learn her through his tongue. Sometimes it was kissing, and sometimes it was something like learning, like collecting seashells, the way Cassiopeia had, turning them over and over to memorize the miracle of ridges and whorls built by thousands of years of soft water.
They played a game where their eyes stayed closed and they had to see with their mouths instead. Lyra knew bodies for what they did and what they failed to do, and her only feelings had been in sickness or in pain. She learned the soft wonder of the human body on the planes of his chest, and on the angles of his shoulders, and in the soft fuzz of hair, like the gentlest kiss, below his belly button. She learned it on his scalloped ears, and on his kneecaps, and on his long and gentle fingers.
She learned his body, and she learned that her bodywas a strange and watery thing that pooled and flowed and turned all at once to a current; the pressure of his tongue, on her neck, on her nipples, on her thighs, turned her into a million other things. She became air and the electric possibility of lightning. She became a furred animal, howling in summer. She became his mouth, and she existed in his mouth. She poured her whole body into the radius of the circles he made with his tongue. And at the same time her body became huge, like a long shout of joy hanging in the quiet.
They had a game to kiss each other on every scar, slowly, starting from the neck. They had a game to find the darkest place they could and touch each other until they couldn’t keep track of whose body was where.Your knee or mine?he would say.Your hand or mine?They had a game to act like the night when it came, and erase all the space between them, to lose their bodies entirely, until they didn’t know who was holding and who was being held. She didn’t have a name for some of the things they did, only a melody, a rhythm that hummed in her skin after they were done.
She wanted things she hardly understood: to be closer, closer, closer than bodies could ever be. She wanted to take her body off and for him to shed his, too, and to stand like two shadows overlapping with not a shiver of space between them.
And she wanted to keep her body, so he would keep kissing it.
She learned how to tell time, and every morning, she counted the hours until dark, when Caelum was no longer Caelum, and she was no longer Lyra, and both of them became each other.
She was terrified that one day it wouldn’t work, that the distance would put up a hand, and hold them apart.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 1 of Gemma’s story.
TWO
AND THEN, ON THURSDAY, IT happened.
At Haven, Lyra had been bored so often that, paradoxically, she had almost never been bored at all. Little things consumed her attention: the petty squabbles she imagined between her belongings; the replicas who went to the Box or were disciplined by the nurses; her small missions, planned and executed with all the precision of a military invasion, to steal words from medicine bottle labels or even the nurses’ cigarette packs.
But now that there was so much to see, so much to do, she was often bored. On Thursday, a bright day of puffed-up clouds, the world beyond her windows looked dizzy in its own light. But when Lyra suggested to Caelum that they take a walk, he looked at her with eyes burned like wounds in his face.
“No,” he said. And then, looking back at the TV, “This isn’t my place.”
Caelum had wanted to escape. He’d been Code Black. And now when Lyra thought of Haven and what had happened to it, her memories were intertwined with him, with the moment she’d slipped through the fence past the drums of old construction litter and biohazard signs and where he’d first touched her wrist. If she had known about the world, about space and time, she would have known that matter bends the universe around it. But even without knowing that, she saw how Caelum had bent her universe, and made everything change.
He had wanted to be free, and to see how real people lived. But now they were free and he wouldn’t go outside except at night, when there was nothing at all to see. He learned the world only from what he saw on TV.
